by Kevin Brooks
The line shuffled forward.
The woman in front of me was thinking about joining the line to our left. I could see her weighing it up, trying to work out which line was moving the fastest. She hesitated, changed her mind, then decided to go for it. As she stepped to one side, I stepped up, but then she changed her mind again and squeezed back in front of me.
I moved back to give her some room, then started digging around in my pocket, looking for some money. Dad had given me £20 that morning, and I still had most of it left.
“Make sure you get yourself something to eat,” he’d told me. “And get a taxi back from the station if it’s late.”
He’d given me the look then, the look that says, I’m not going to lecture you about what sort of food to eat or what to spend my money on, because you’re old enough to act responsibly now…and I’d like to think I can trust you…but just watch it—OK?
His face flashed into my mind for a moment—long and gray and serious—and I wondered, as I’ve often wondered before, why he always appeared so distant to me…so detached, so remote. It sometimes felt as if he wasn’t my father at all, just a tall gray man called Dr. Beck, who lived in the same house as me and told me what to do.
I pulled a £5 note from my pocket. It was folded up into a tight little square and, as I yanked it out, the edge got caught in the lining of my pocket and a handful of coins came flying out. I made a grab for them with my other hand, but they were already clattering to the floor—chink-chink-chink—and rolling like mad all over the place. Everyone looked around, of course—looking at the floor, watching the coins, watching them roll. God, they rolled a long way. A few people started stamping on them, or bending down to pick them up, but most of the others couldn’t care less. After a quick look to check out the dumb kid throwing his money around, they just shook their heads and got back to their business.
I could still feel my face turning red, though.
I knew I was expected to do something, but I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to go scrabbling around on my hands and knees looking for 10p pieces. I didn’t want people looking at me. But then, if I didn’t start picking the coins up, if I just stood there and left them on the floor, everyone would think I was a spoiled little brat, some fancy-pants rich kid with too much money for his own good. I could imagine them thinking, Look at him, who does he think he is, standing there throwing his money away…
I didn’t know what to do.
I wished I’d never come in here.
Eventually, I decided on a compromise. I’d pick up the coins I could see, then have a quick look around, like I was looking for the rest of them, then I’d shrug my shoulders and casually stroll back to the line. Maybe I could even try smiling a bit…you know, one of those self-mocking smiles that says, Sheesh, I dunno, what am I like, eh? What an idiot…
I was just starting to practice the look when a young woman came up and handed me a £1 coin.
“Thanks,” I said.
She smiled and pointed across the room. “There’s another one over there—it went under that table.”
“Right,” I said, looking anxiously at the black guys sitting at the table—shaved heads, hammered eyes, skullcaps. One of them turned his head and gave me a look that froze my blood. “Uh…yeah, thanks,” I told the woman. “I’ll probably get it later.”
She shrugged and went back to the line. I looked down at the floor. I could feel the black guys watching me, and I could feel my face getting hotter and hotter, and I could feel the sweat seeping out from under my hat—and then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You want me to get it for you?”
I was too flustered to recognize the voice at first. It was just another voice, just another Good Samaritan sticking their nose in, making things worse. I sighed to myself and turned around, getting ready to say thanks-but-no-thanks, but when I saw who it was, the words disappeared from my head.
Everything disappeared.
It was the girl, of course. The girl from the station. The girl with the smile and the skin and the eyes…
“They’re not as bad as they look,” she said.
I tried to say who? but my mouth had gone numb. All I could do was pout my lips and look stupid.
The girl smiled. “Those guys at the table…they’re not as scary as they look. They won’t mind you getting your quid back.”
“Oh,” I said.
She looked at me.
I could feel myself drowning in her eyes.
Her head shook with a little laugh, then she turned away and walked across to the table where the black guys were sitting. They looked up as she approached, and she raised her hand and said something to one of them. He shrugged his shoulders and showed his palms, then smiled and said something back. She laughed, touched his arm, then bent down and picked up the £1 coin from under the table. As she stooped down, her skirt rode up, and the guys at the table leaned across to get a better look. One of them closed his eyes and shook his head, as if it was just too much to take.
The girl straightened up, nodded at the black guys, then turned around and came back to me.
“There you go,” she said, passing me the coin.
“Thanks,” I told her. “You didn’t have to…”
“No problem.”
“I was just…I was going to…”
She touched my arm and looked behind me. “You’re next.”
“What?”
She nodded at the counter. “You’re next. They’re waiting for you.”
I looked around. I was standing at the counter. Somehow I’d managed to get to the front of the line. A lanky kid with floppy hair was standing behind the register, looking expectantly at me.
“Help you?” he said.
“Yeah…sorry. I’d like uh…I’ll have…um…” I was looking up at the menu board again, not seeing anything, just looking for the sake of looking, because I didn’t know where else to look and I needed time to think, to find the courage to say what I wanted to say. I must have stood there for a thousand years, looking up at that menu board, staring blindly at the senseless blur of pictures and words, my heart ticking away like a frantic clock, pumping blood and oxygen into my muscles, my cells, my nerves…heightening my senses. It was a really weird feeling. My mind was racing, but I couldn’t think. I could see everything, every dot and every movement, but none of it made any sense. The silence inside me was deafening.
In the end, I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, emptied my mind, and turned to the girl.
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked her.
She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We found a table by the window, cleared off all the rubbish, and sat down. I’d gotten myself the usual, and the girl had gone for a chocolate doughnut with an extra-large Coke and tons of ice. I watched her now as she put the drink on the table and lowered her mouth to the straw.
“Are you sure that’s all you want?” I asked.
She nodded, sucking hard on the straw, drinking with the breathless concentration of a child. I unwrapped my burger and started to eat. I wasn’t really hungry anymore, but I was glad to have something to do with my hands. Nervous hands are hard to disguise when they’re idle. I chewed and swallowed, wiped some relish from my lips, glanced at my watch…
“Meeting someone?” the girl asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Sorry?”
I coughed, choking on a bit of lettuce, realizing the stupidity of my answer. Not really, I’d said, not really… How can you not really be meeting someone?
God…
“You all right?” the girl said.
“Yeah…I’ve got a—huh-uhh—excuse me. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”
“You’ve got a what?”
“You asked if I was meeting someone…”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”
“Oh, right—I thought you meant that’s why you
were coughing.”
“No…that was just…I was just coughing.”
“Right,” she nodded, smiling to herself. “That’s that sorted out, then.”
“Yeah…”
She went back to her Coke for a while, and I picked a few crumbs from my burger and fiddled around with the napkin, folding it and twisting it and wiping my fingers with it, all the time listening to the sweet little slurps from across the table. Then we both looked up and started speaking at the same time.
“Where are you—”
“I don’t usually—”
“Sorry,” I said. “After you.”
She smiled. “I was just going to ask where you’re going. I didn’t know there were any doctors around here.”
“Pentonville Road,” I told her. “It’s a private place…”
She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Private, eh? Well, well, well, but she didn’t say anything, just nodded quietly and bit into her doughnut.
“My dad’s a doctor,” I explained. “He knows other doctors, you know, friends of his…”
“Right,” she said through a mouthful of doughnut.
“It’s quite handy sometimes…”
“It must be. What’s the matter with you?”
I pulled up my sleeve and showed her the lump on my wrist.
“Ugh!” she said. “What’s that?”
“It’s nothing really…just a lump. It’s called a ganglion.”
She laughed, spitting out bits of chocolate. “A gangly what?”
“Ganglion—it’s like a…like a muscle thing…” I was trying to remember what Dad had told me about the lump. He’d explained it all to me, drawing little pictures and everything, but I hadn’t really been listening. “It’s something to do with the fluid from your muscle,” I told the girl. “It kind of leaks out and forms this lump—”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does it leak out?”
“I don’t know.”
She’d finished her doughnut now and was digging out lumps of ice from her Coke, popping them into her mouth and sucking them.
“Can’t your dad fix it?” she said. “You said he was a doctor…”
“He’s not that sort of a doctor.”
“What sort is he, then?”
I blushed, as I always do when this question comes up. “He’s a…uh…he’s a gynecologist.”
She didn’t laugh, or smirk, or make any jokes. She just crunched an ice cube and looked at me. “A gynecologist?”
“Yeah…this other doctor, the one I’m going to see, he’s a specialist—”
“A lump specialist?”
“Right,” I said, smiling.
Her face changed when I smiled. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it was almost as if a layer of skin had sloughed away, revealing another face, an even prettier face, hiding beneath a mask. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You ought to do it more often. It looks really nice.”
My head crumpled under the strain of the compliment, and I had to look down at the table. My skin was so hot I could hear it sizzling.
“Sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I’m not coming on to you or anything, I was just saying, you know…you’ve got a nice smile. That’s all. It’s the truth.” She paused. “You want me to say you’re ugly?”
I looked up, cracking an ugly smile.
“That’s better,” she said. “My name’s Candy, by the way.”
“Joe,” I told her. “Joe Beck.”
She nodded. “Thanks for the doughnut, Lumpy Joe.”
“You’re welcome.”
We looked at each other, grinning like idiots, then my nerves got the better of me again and I buried my head in my coffee cup.
Candy laughed.
“What?” I said.
“You.”
“What?”
“Nothing…”
She was still chuckling as she reached into a little black handbag and took out a pack of cigarettes. She tapped one out and lit it with a disposable lighter.
My surprise must have shown on my face.
“Sorry,” she said, reaching for the pack. “Did you want one?”
“No…no, thanks. I don’t smoke.” I looked anxiously around the room. “Are you sure you’re allowed to smoke in here?”
She didn’t say anything, just shrugged, blowing out smoke and tapping ash into the doughnut wrapper. She looked around, casting her eyes over the black guys, then out the window, up and down the street, over at the station, then she took another drag on her cigarette and looked back at me. Her eyes smiled and she nodded at my hat. “Do you wear that all the time?”
“Not always…”
“It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Why don’t you take it off?”
“What?”
“Take it off…I want to see if the rest of your hair is as messy as the bits I can see.”
For some reason, I started feeling uncomfortable again. “Well…” I said, “you know, I have to get going soon…I ’m late already.”
She just looked at me.
I sighed and took off my hat.
Her eyes widened at the sight of my hair. “Wow! How do you get it like that? How do you get it so messy?”
“It’s not easy…it takes years of careful cultivation.”
She laughed.
“I’m not joking,” I said. “The trick with messy hair is making it look messy without it looking like it’s supposed to look messy.”
“You’ve done a pretty good job of it.”
“Thanks very much.”
“You’re welcome.”
This time I didn’t look away. I just grinned and pushed my burger to one side. It was cold now. Cold and forgotten. I didn’t care. Who needs a cold burger when you’re talking to a pretty girl? And I was talking to her, I realized. I wasn’t just sitting there mumbling and looking embarrassed, I was actually talking to her. Not only that, but I was starting to enjoy it, too. Which was really surprising, because I never felt good talking to girls. I always felt nervous and shaky, unsure of myself…especially with girls that I liked. And I liked Candy. I liked her a lot. I liked the way she looked—her face, her eyes, her lips, her legs, her skin—and I liked the way she smelled—of soap and talcum powder. Everything about her excited me. She made me feel fresh. She made me hot. She made me cold. She fired me up and turned my body inside out. And usually that would have messed me up so much I wouldn’t have been able to feel anything, but this time I could feel it. God, I could feel it. And it felt good, like a rush of pure adrenaline…
Of course, that’s not to say I wasn’t feeling nervous and shaky and unsure of myself, because I was. To tell you the truth, I was scared to death—scared and wary and unable to think of one good reason why this stunning girl was sitting here talking to me. Why wasn’t she talking to someone else? Someone older than me, or smarter than me, or taller or cooler…?
Why pick on me?
What did I have to offer?
I didn’t waste too much time thinking about it, though.
I mean—who cares?
She was leaning on the table now, resting her chin in her hand, smoking her cigarette and gazing idly around the room. The tip of the cigarette was rimmed with crimson lipstick. Her eyes shone darkly, moist with black shadow and mascara, and although they looked unbelievably good, there was something slightly unsettling about them. I couldn’t work it out at first, but after a while I realized what it was—it was her pupils. They were really small, like tiny black holes, shrunken and empty. Like pinpricks of darkness.
“What’s that on your fingers?” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Your fingers.”
I looked at my hands. “Where?”
“There,” she said, touching the fingers of my left hand. I stiffened. Her touch was electric, hot and cold, like nothing I�
�d ever felt before. “What’s the matter?” she said, still holding my fingers.
“Nothing…”
“Does it hurt?”
“No…”
“What is it?”
I looked down again, suddenly realizing what she was talking about. “Oh, that,” I said. “It’s just hardened skin—calluses…from playing the guitar.”
“You play the guitar?”
I nodded.
She looked at me. “You any good?”
“I don’t know. I’m all right, I suppose…”
“You get fingers like this from playing the guitar?”
“Yeah, you know, pressing the strings…”
“What kind of guitar?”
“Bass, mostly.”
“Really? Are you in a band or anything?”
“Well,” I said, starting to feel embarrassed again, “sort of…”
“What do you mean—sort of?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“What—a real band? You play gigs and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, you know, it’s mostly local stuff. Pubs and clubs, school things…”
I never liked talking about being in a band. It always made me feel so pretentious, like, Oh, yeah, I’m in a band, you know…as if being in a band is some kind of awesomely admirable achievement. I didn’t mind doing it—I loved being in a band—I just didn’t like talking about it. It made me feel uncomfortable—and, just then, I was uncomfortable enough as it was. Candy was still touching my fingertips, brushing them lightly with her nails, which was nice, but it was starting to get a bit too nice…
“Any records?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“What are you called?”
I hesitated.
“Go on,” she said. “Tell me—I might have heard of you.”
“I doubt it—we’re called The Katies.”
“Katies? Like the girl’s name?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I gently removed my hand from hers and wiped a drop of sweat from my lip. “Well, we used to be called Kate’s Bored—”
“Bored as in boring?”
“Yeah—it’s kind of a skateboard thing.”
She looked puzzled.
“Skateboard,” I said. “Skateboard—Kate’s Bored…?”